Is it uncool to thank the WP universe for the love I experienced last week? I don’t care. I am thanking you all now. I’ve never been known as “cool.”
Last week, I was in Las Vegas with my sisters and mother — the first all-girl reunion we’ve ever had. I thought millions of ideas for blog posts would rise from that and a few are indeed germinating. But right now I’m getting ready for another family visit to my stepdaughter and her husband and then next week, a Mother’s Day visit with The Distiller in Colorado. My heart and days are full of the rich complicated love that comes with visits made intense because they are brief and because they ask us to balance history and the present with grace while getting very little sleep.
But there was more. I received a shot of love from the universe that I never expected. First, a fellow blogger, Oliver Gray, reposted my “Drinking Lessons” piece. Then, last weekend in Las Vegas, as my sister and I were drifting off the sleep around midnight, I glanced at my blog on my iPod. All those notices! I almost shouted when I realized what had happened.
In true sister fashion, she sat straight up in the dark and said, “That’s great! I’m so proud of you! What does it mean?”
She turned on the light again and began to resurrect her WP log in so she could check it out. At midnight. She’s a good sister.
Since then, I’ve “met” over a hundred new friends and connected with others who have common interests and who were generous and reposted as well. It has been wonderful and I look forward to following them and sharing more from and with them very soon.
So, thank you, universe. I will be thinking of you as I travel over the next two weeks, gathering material and inspiration. There will be something about my mother — after all it is going to be Mothers Day. And I understand that when I get to Colorado, I will be meeting a donkey. Three actually. The Distiller appears to be branching out into new ventures.
The Distiller bought “Jack and Jenny” off Craigslist in February. Turns out Jenny had a little surprise for him. Stanley (below) was born on The Distiller’s birthday a couple of weeks ago.
The distiller and I are sitting across from each other in the swelter of a Denver June afternoon, three tiny unlabeled bottles of bourbon lined up before us. He pours from one into a scratched goblet that will serve as a snifter, lifts it to his nose, and then offers it to me like a teacher holding out a piece of chalk.
My turn.
Our classroom is the backyard of the rented house that he shares with his girlfriend, his Bassett hound, a cat, and a roommate to help pay the rent while he gets his business off the ground. He is showing me how to taste the spirit in which he has invested thousands of hours and dollars that he has scraped to earn, borrow, or finance at vertiginous rates on credit cards. As with wine, there is the “nosing,” the swirling, the chewing, the spitting, but the step that follows the first taste is the one that gets my full attention.
“Warm it,” he instructs. “Cup the glass in your hands, like this. Bring it in close, hold it next to your heart.”
The moment feels as fragile as the glass in my palm. I know from experience that one false move can shatter it.
I swirl and swish. While my nose strains to pick up notes of oak, the judge who lives inside me inhales a whiff of old anxieties. The distiller is my son. There is the matter of the credit cards, the nagging concern about the business he’s chosen given his past, complicated relationship with alcohol, the kinds of things mothers are supposed to worry about. I have a list of those things. It seems to write itself during the long stretches between our visits, it unfurls in my brain after our phone calls which often leave me with more questions than they answer. The details of his days are lost to me and so I fill in the blanks with pictures patched together from casual references, the sudden silences when I ask a question that goes too far, or assumptions based on the boy I knew who lived with me for sixteen years. It’s my job to worry, I used to tell him with a smile meant to smooth things over between us.
But I’m no longer sure what my job is when it comes to him. I weigh the fear in my heart as the glass warms in my palm. I’m tired of this worry. It seems to have outlived its usefulness which, I am beginning to understand, was only useful to me. I believed it tethered us but in fact it has been driving us apart for years. It has never stopped anything bad from happening. It has never helped anything good happen. And right now I am sitting in the sun occupying a moment with a person I have loved his whole life and I want to savor it. All of it.
I take a sip. The bourbon settles on my tongue and begins to release its history layer by layer. He talks about the charring of oak barrels, the differences between this and whiskey aged in peat but I’m letting the warmth sink into me. I’m thinking about how competent he seems, how intensely serious he is about what he is doing, how undeterred he has been since he started down this road, and of how little he wants or needs the things I used to provide.
It occurs to me that this moment is the distillation of every one that had has led up to it beginning with the moment he slithered out of my body and began to breathe on his own. It holds the echoes of the social worker who tried to convince me at eighteen to give him up to older parents who were ready in ways I could not be. It grew from the doubt and fear of being responsible for a person’s life along with the determination to hold on to him and prove her wrong. It contains the ache I felt when, sixteen years later, I realized I needed to find him a safe place to finish growing up even if it was over two thousand miles away. In this moment are the lessons I’ve learned and relearned in the nearly sixteen years since then about what I can control and what I can’t and that being his mother means, ultimately, letting him go.
The fact is, he’s done fine. He’s done better than fine even with some false starts and some painful setbacks that I sometimes knew of but other times discovered after his wounds had healed and the lessons they taught, absorbed.
The glass in my hand flashes in the sun and seems to expose my worry for what it is: a reflex and something I need to fill spaces left empty by my job, by the writing I haven’t started yet, by the need to define myself to others according to his successes and failures. I have been afraid that if I stop worrying, I will be letting him go. If I let him go, I will lose him.
This realization opens inside me like a window and before I can do much about it, the fear slips out. I am left with my son, his eyes shining with enthusiasm and some surprise — I haven’t interrupted him once since we sat down. I am left in this moment full of sun and promise and a kind of stillness we have never shared before.
In the five years since that visit, he’s moved from that backyard to Grand Junction. The distillery thrives and so does he. We’ve had more moments since then. Some perfect, some not. Keepers, all. But here is the one that I summon up when I come home and begin to wonder again how to be a mother of a grown and still-growing human being:
We are driving to the tiny Grand Junction airport after one more visit that in the old days I would have complained was too short. The hot breath of the high desert blows through his truck windows and surrounds us. There is so much I want to say but I don’t trust myself to speak when we are about to leave each other for another long absence. My son reaches over and closes his hand around mine. His palm is rough against my skin, his grip gentle and unhurried. I say nothing. I don’t think about when he’ll have to let go. I taste the moment fully, breathe it in. I hold it close to my heart.
If you find yourself thirsty for more information about this bourbon and other fine spirits, here’s a video and a link to the site for Peach Street Distillers.
We’re two friends walking along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. For one of us the walk is preparation for a 200-mile pilgrimage, for the other, it is a chance to taste a part of the adventure vicariously.
Patty is training. I am tasting.
Later this month, she’ll fly to Spain and walk two-fifths of the 500-mile journey from France to Santiago de Compostela, a path trekked by thousands of pilgrims over nearly two thousand years. I’m going to be right here waiting for her to come back and tell me all about it.
Patty isn’t religious. She just wants to walk that road, sleep with strangers in hostels, sip coffee in the company of pilgrims and taste the food she will find along the way. Although she has logged thousands of miles on planes, trains and automobiles, walking or biking is her favorite way to travel. She will leave laptop and cell phone behind as she always does. She will leave her husband behind this time too, although he has put almost as many miles on his feet and bike as she has. The trip will find its way unfiltered into her soul and her memory.
I am not exactly jealous but I feel something, a kind of longing. I have always been fascinated by long-distance walking. Theoretically, anyway. It held no fascination for me when I was in college with an infant and no car. As a kid, I used to hide when my mother organized multi-family hikes up one of the hundreds of mountains surrounding our house in northern New Hampshire. For a long time, I thought people who walked by choice were a little insane, sort of like the robot police car thought Leonard Meade was in Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian.”
Now that I don’t have to walk and in fact spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer screen, I am fascinated by the idea of covering great distances by foot. I follow blogs or news reports of cross-country walkers. I order catalogs for walking tours in Europe, Africa, and Asia. I like to imagine myself seeing a place up close for the first time, feeling it in the fatigue of my muscles and the contours of the road beneath my feet. In my mind I’ve walked thousands of miles which is a little like saying that I’ve written ten novels without typing a single sentence.
Patty, on the other hand, is the real deal. She’s packed her fourteen-pound backpack and is training by taking long walks around San Diego. Not that she needs much training. This is a woman who makes a business out of walking the neighborhoods of the city and bringing them alive to tourists and natives alike. She bikes around town as often as she drives. She has logged thousands of miles visiting nearly 80 countries and has tried to spend at least some time walking or biking in each. Not long ago, she walked across the English countryside with her husband, Rusty and in the eighties, they spent two and a half years circling the globe by air, boat, train, car but as much as possible by foot and bike.
“When you’re walking or riding a bike, you’re living the way people always have lived,” she says. “You wake up, head in the direction you’ve picked out and find food and shelter as you go. We do these things home at home too but we don’t think about it. So much is already done for us.”
For Patty, traveling is defined simply as, “going someplace new.” She adds, “I don’t care if it is pretty or not or if the food is good. I want to know what it is like to live in a place.” This doesn’t mean that no one has been there before her. It simply means she has not been there and when she does go, she wants to take it all in, warts and all. She understands that seeing a place, really seeing it, makes it new.
As we make our way along the edge of the ocean, I find myself thinking how differently we travel but also about the similarities in our work and lives. We are both pilgrims in a way.
We both come from small towns miles from anywhere “exciting.” Patty is driven to explore a place she has never seen. I am driven to explore the terrain of the heart and mind. She is always searching for something new to see even in places she knows by heart. I am searching for a new way to express ideas so old they have no age. She likes waking up in the morning, setting out in the direction she has picked and finding what she needs along the way. I get up in the morning with a plan, a direction and then, along the way must forage for material, for ideas, for words. Sometimes they come just exactly the way I thought they would.
Most times, though, they surprise me and alter my course. And this Patty understands too. The surprise is the thing that pilgrims are most in search of whether they realize it or not: that serendipitous moment, a flash of insight, a family that lets you pitch a tent on their farm and then invites you in for dinner, a glimpse of a rare bird or a view that no photograph can ever capture.
There is art to it, discipline and joy. I am thinking that this is why writers like Dickens, Twain used to walk ten miles or more a day and why, more recently writers like Cheryl Strayed have chosen to make one spectacular journey with nothing between them and their goal. Their physical journeys feed their journeys as writers.
I wanted to tag along with Patty on her training walk to see if I could get a little of her journey to rub off on me – to make it mine. But that’s not how it works in walking or writing. To really see something new, even in a place you have lived for years, you have to do it yourself.
A view of Santiago de Compostela awaiting Patty at the end of her pilgrimage (Source: By Alejandro Moreno Calvo from Madrid, Spain [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)
Bonus links:
If you are or will be in San Diego, you can take a walk with Patty. Check out her website here: Urban Safaris
Another bonus link I found for Bradbury fans. It is in German but even if you do not speak that language, the story comes through loud and clear and the images are perfect.
It’s the only way to get rid of them. They keep coming back like relatives you miss until they come and stay for months, or the chatty kind of people you try to evade at parties but just can’t. Everywhere you turn, there they are, all bright, happy, and softhearted — the kind you just can’t say no to — and they know it.
I’m talking about nasturtiums. I planted a few one year – I don’t know when. It doesn’t matter. If you say yes to a packet of nasturtium seeds, you will be living with the results for the rest of your life and beyond. The generations springing from that one packet will thrive long after you’re gone.
The term ‘invasive’ does not begin to describe the goings on among the nasturtiums in my backyard. These guys have no respect for boundaries, they sprout, climb, spill over the retaining wall, and completely smother the diedes I planted to add a little structure, a little class to the place.
Nasturtiums thrive on neglect which is, as it happens, is the cornerstone of my gardening strategy. Then, just when they’re really getting out of hand, they do something charming, like blossom. First a yellow one, then an orange, sometimes a red. They hide among the leaves and then peek out like flirts until one morning you wake up and the whole tangle is ablaze. It’s kind of like a slow-motion floral fireworks display that marks the coming and going of spring here in California. Plus, they hide the weeds.
How can you hate that?
I don’t really. I’m just not comfortable with what they tell visitors about my gardening habits. Clearly the nasturtiums are in control of the landscape, not me. But I tell people I planted them for food. Each blossom harbors a sweet, juicy burst which somehow goes perfectly with the peppery petals. Harvest happens when I let the dog out or when I feel like making a salad.
So, for a few months every year, I let them have their way. The first leaves sprout in December or January and they just sort of poke along, getting bigger and greener. The blossoms start to appear in March and by the end of April or early May, they explode into color. I eat as many as I can and then yank them out.
They don’t care. They always come back.
Lunch:
I added my friends to a salad of greens, fennel, goat cheese and toasted pignoli nuts. Chop up the stems too – they are delicious!
Lunch with my friends
PS: Turns out there are all kinds of ways to use these babies. Here some of the ones I found. If you try any, let me know how they turned out!
On Good Friday last year, my step-daughter checked into the hospital for the second phase of post-mastectomy reconstruction. As we packed to go help her through the recovery, I found myself pondering the word, “reconstruction” as if I’d never heard it before.
Reconstruction is what people do after tsunamis, floods, fires, and wars. Builders in New York and New Jersey can’t keep up with the demand to put back what Hurricane Sandy took.
It is a short leap from “reconstruction” to other “re” words: Restore. Revisit. Reword. Reinvent. Replace. Remove. Remodel. Renew. Hope lives in these “re” words. I too have at times clung to them like a drowning person hugs a hunk of driftwood. Revise. Retrench. Remarry.
But does any amount of rebuilding truly replace what is gone? The answer is no, of course not, though, years ago, I believed that attaching “re” to the front of a verb meant I could erase a mistake or some damage I had done to myself or others. In order for “re” to work, you have to incorporate bits and pieces from the past even if they are not wood and brick, flesh and bone. Sometimes the only things left to work with are lessons learned or memories shared.
My stepdaughter and her husband have been caught in a storm for the past seven years. It took their child. Then it took her uterus, her breasts, several lymph nodes and countless ounces of bodily fluids or bits of flesh required for medical tests. It attacked the economy, their livelihoods, drained their savings and stripped away any illusion that life was fair.
They don’t go on about it but we know that rebuilding is painful. There are daily reminders of what has been lost: bills, surgical scars, chronic pain, pink ribbons crossed in solidarity with other women and pink roses planted to remember their little girl. Each day is an anniversary of what might have been.
Still, there she was last year on Good Friday, heading into surgery to continue the reconstruction of her breasts. There he was, telling her a joke to make her laugh and then holding her against his chest and telling her how much he loved her. It was impossible to see that surgery as anything but an act of faith, if not in the future, then in themselves and in each other and in that one moment.
It’s been nearly a year since then. In that year, there has been a shift in the tides. Things are still not easy for these two we love but the cancer is gone and they celebrate that. He has completed a Master’s degree while working a full time job. She works on her art and at her job with a wellness center that specializes in helping people with pain and with problems like autism. We are often mystified but delighted by the running jokes and movie references that crack them up on days when there doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about.
Without ever saying it, they remind us every day that while the instinct to rebuild or restore may be in our DNA, acting on it is a conscious decision that takes courage. Rebuilding is an integral part of the healing process, not an attempt to conceal the pain or damage. They remind us that true healing doesn’t mean that the pain goes away or that things will be “good as new.” It means understanding that nothing is permanent and then choosing to really live, right now, in the best way possible.
For them, for all of us, every day is reconstruction day, an opportunity to begin again. And again. And again.
I’m not a historian but I am a woman and Women’s History Month reminds me that without the help of incredible women working over many years, my personal history would read very differently.
This point was driven home for me earlier this month as my husband and I watched Makers: The Women Who Make America. It was driven home even more deeply by 26 women who shared with me their thoughts on the kinds of questions I haven’t asked or answered in a long time, if ever. I sent them eleven sentences I asked them to finish (to see them all, play the video above). The group includes mothers, teachers, lawyers, judges, students, marketing executives, accountants, and women who have had to work at any job they could find. Some are married. Some are not. Some have been and are no longer. This is a very strong and mixed group of women but we know that there are many women from all walks of life and philosophy who are not represented here. This will be something to work towards.
One thing is clear: as women we have the power to influence other women through our words, our example, our work, the art we make or love and share –and not always in ways one might expect.
Doing this made me realize that I don’t spend enough time talking with other women about things that matter. I hope that this exercise is the beginning of many conversations I will have with the women in my life and women I come to know. I’ve decided to tuck these questions away and use them like those little cards people hand out at parties called, “conversation starters.” I invite you to do the same. Even better, use the comments section here to add to the conversation with your answers and even better questions. If nothing else, we will have paused together for a moment to reflect on a piece of history both past and perhaps shape our stories-in-the-making. All the questions appear in the video so go ahead and play it if you’d like a quick look.
Finally: this kind of conversation is not just for women. There will be men reading this who are at home with children while their wives work or serve in the military, there are men who have watched their daughters come of age during times of huge change followed by significant setbacks, there are husbands who have struggled, adapted and, struggled some more to figure out their roles in marriages that are influenced by the jobs available or not available to women along with the expectations society still has of men and of women. There are sons who have never sat down over a cup of coffee with their mothers and asked them what being a woman in today’s world means to them.
If that is too much to start with, then just ask a woman who her favorite female character in a book or movie is. Then ask her why. You’ll both probably learn something.
Okay, I’ll shut up now and let these wonderful women speak. Or, rather, I’ll show you their answers. Each section below shows the question asked and provides a link in blue to the answers right below the photo. Clicking on the link will take you to a few slides with all the wonderful answers. If you’d like to see everything all at once, scroll to the end and click onto the link “Women Talking to Women Master.”
Women who offered us insights over the years might be surprised at what “stuck.” Wisdom reflected here ranges from practical safety “cover your drink when you go to a party” to the inspiring “you can do anything.” Perhaps most poignant is that some of the women responding here could not point to a woman who offered wisdom along the way.
Sometimes the people who love us the most give us bad advice. Which means it’s a good thing when we ignore it or find our path in spite of it. These answers provide required reading for anyone thinking of giving any advice to any woman.
A list that features everyone from Pearl S. Buck to Chelsea Handler is worth a look. Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In) made the list along with Isabel Allende, Margaret Mitchell, Ann Patchett, Alicia Keys, Lalita Tademy and others.
This list confirms that art can inspire us or show us the kind of women we would like to be (some of the time anyway). Some characters draw admirers from all ages (Nancy Drew, Scarlett O’Hara) some show us that we really should be reading more.
Not surprisingly, Hillary gets lots of mentions but so does Malala Yousufzai, one of the youngest women to show courage and vision in the face of oppression.
The right to vote, access to birth control, access to education for all women regardless of race, the women’s movement of the Sixties and Seventies have profoundly impacted women’s opportunities.
Education. Poverty. Health. Equal pay. Equal rights. These are running themes when women list challenges faced by women in the US and around the world. The answers reflect that nothing should be taken for granted and that we have a long way to go.
This is just a sampling of the thoughtful responses inside, one representing each decade. Reading all of them will give you a very clear sense of the impact a few words can have and the vacuum that exists when no one offers them.
Looking back I would wish that I had been encouraged to think bigger.” [Anonymous 1930s]
“I can’t say it would have made any difference if a woman encouraged me because I came up in a male-dominated world. Women need to actively mentor other women continuously. We need to open doors for each other the way men do. Every time we move forward an inch, we need to reach back and bring a woman along with us.” [Rae 1940s]
“Stay in college.” [Joleen 1950s]
“Stay in Europe.” [MJ 1960s]
“Have the confidence to trust my instincts. That advice came from a male mentor. But it would have meant more coming from a woman because women, I think, have to work harder at developing confidence than men do.” [Elizabeth 1970s]
“Be strong but always keep an open mind, things are not always as they seem.” [Elisa 1980s]
These answers are packed with with the lessons these women have learned and want to offer to young women preparing for their future. The beauty of these is that there is more than one voice from more than one generation. Individually and together, they can get a conversation started with a teenage woman near you.
Overall, the optimists outnumber those who view the future of women with more caution. The optimism is rooted in the strength and gifts of today’s young women and in the examples set by women who are leading the way in politics, human rights, business, education and more.
If you would like to see the entire slide deck in one go, here is the pdf version:
Above: Four minutes of fun in Bettina’s Minimalist Kitchen, “The White Box” (In English with subtitles).
The urge to purge seems to be running through my network of friends and family like the cold that’s been making the rounds. Last week, I was flat on my back with just enough energy to watch the entire first season of Shameless (British version) but everyone else, apparently, was seized with the desire to jettison dead weight.
A friend from New York, returning from more than a year in India, found that all those boxes he’d put into storage were filled with things he didn’t need or want. A couple who enthrall us with stories about their decades of traveling the globe by bike, foot, or by any means available, pitched nearly all of the Kodachrome slides documenting those trips into the dumpster last week. I’ve found no fewer than 100 blog posts about spring cleaning, de-cluttering and in Sunday’s New York Times an entrepreneur proclaimed the benefits of downsizing with a zeal that almost made me want to get up, get dressed, and throw some stuff away.
I’m guessing I score 6.5 on the scale from 1 to 10 where 1 equals extreme hoarder and 10 equals Bettina, the minimalist decorator in Absolutely Fabulous who believes a stove just clutters the kitchen. My score is undoubtedly influenced by my mother, a woman who believes that one of the best ways to work out solutions to life’s problems is to clean a closet, something she’s more than happy to do for her children whenever she visits.
But that’s a post for another time. Today, it’s about the stuff that has survived my mother, the twenty-six moves I’ve made since I was seventeen, and our recent efforts to downsize. They’ve become companions of sorts, the kind that tell me more than I sometimes want to know about the person I used to be and have become.
Embarrassing but true: I still have the shreds of a blanket I’ve owned since I was ten years old, itself a replacement for the “bankie” that preceded it. Somewhere in the garage there is a box with a pair of denim overalls that I wore when I was seventeen and the soft cotton maroon shirt I liked to wear under it. I own a pair of faded blue short-shorts that I could, in my twenties, wear without blushing. Ditto for a black Betsey Johnson dress, a tube of shirred lycra that I’ve only ever worn once in public. If I could bottle the feeling I had when I wore it, I’d make millions. I don’t recognize the woman who wore that dress but coming across it in my closet triggers a feeling as warm and dangerous as a secret love. I own a beat-up stethoscope given to me when I was twelve. I carry it in a hat box that also contains an Eisenhower silver dollar, one jade earring from a pair given to me by my mother upon the publication of my first magazine article. And I have a metal file box that contains artifacts from loves that failed. At least I think it does. I haven’t looked inside for years.
On the less embarrassing side: I have kept every note, card and letter my husband has ever written to me and when I come upon them, I read each all over again, tracing the arc of our story so far, loving him and loving that we have not, will not fail.
I can trace the growth of my son in the artifacts I find: baby book, drawings, Mother’s Day cards, report cards, diploma, photographs, clippings from Colorado newspapers about his business from its earliest days to now.
In its own padded box, there is a blue and white ceramic jar that contains the fragments of dried rose petals. It belonged to my grandmother and my father tells me the dust could be all that remains of roses given to her by man she loved before he left to die in World War I. I want it to be true.
Shelves Are A Wasteland Without Books
Then there are our books. When our realtor advised us to empty our book shelves to provide prospective buyers with a sense of more space, I was incredulous. It was like asking us to bury our best friends, the ones who never let us down no matter how many times we read them,mark them up, or accidentally drench them while reading in the tub. Wouldn’t it look silly to have a lot of book shelves with no books? Not, apparently, in the age of e-readers.
As much as I try to cling to the things that matter, though, they sometimes slip from my grasp. The mate to the jade earring from my mother disappeared years ago. An eccentric and nosy landlord once came into my apartment and “recycled” some papers I had unearthed from storage — everything I had written the age of sixteen to twenty four. A hard drive failed, taking with it two years of correspondence with one of my best friends. He died last year.
These losses did not make me feel lighter or more free in the way, say, tossing out magazines or giving away old but usable clothing can. The things I cherish connect me in some vital way with people I love or times in my life that helped shape who I am now. The losses of these things are sharp reminders that we don’t get to keep anything or anyone we love, no matter how much we want to or how hard we hold on.
Some links to more on things and what they say about the people who carry them:
![A view of Santiago de Compostela awaiting Patty at the end of her pilgrimage (Source: By Alejandro Moreno Calvo from Madrid, Spain [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)](http://turnwriteandkeepgoing.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/vista_de_santiago_de_compostela.jpg)
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